I'm trying to setup Gentoo on my Thinkpad X40 (1.2 Pentium M, 768Mb RAM, 40 Gb Hard Drive, Intel 2100 wireless, 8 cell battery). I'm really new to linux, but I worked for MS and hate them so I'm switching to Gentoo. I would like to create a Gentoo guide for the Thinkpad X40 but I need some major help making this work well! Considering that it is an awesome machine in Windows XP and that it is reportedly great in Gentoo, I wish I could find more information on what to do.

The end result of my effort will be a super-detailed guide for Gentoo on the Thinkpad X40. Help me out! Currently after dozens of hours of study and work, I have a simple system running Gnome.

Here are the questions I currently have:

1. How should I compile my kernel? It's evident that genkernel will not get me everything I want. I used "make menuconfig" and set my processor on Pentium M, added some of the crypto wireless options and hotplug firmware options to get the wireless card working, turned on all the ACPI options (except for the thinkpad extras as the acpi-thinkpad package won't emerge with them on) and turned off all APM options. It's working, but it's definately not working as well as it should. Anyone got a .config file to post up here? How do you patch kernels and install programs without using emerge?

2. Which Desktop Environment should I use? I'm currently using GNOME, but I'm noticing a lot of things are built for KDE. I've also heard a lot about XFCE. Which one do you prefer for a guide? What's the difference between a desktop environment and a window manager?

3. Is there a wireless app that allows me to check out the available access points, select one, and configure the WPA or WEP key when necessary? A GUI based tool that incorporates the functionality of iwconfig, iwlist? Is there a way to turn off the wireless card to conseve battery life?

4. How do you get suspend, speedstep, and hibernate to work? I installed the IBM ACPI stuff with emerge, and I'm still not sure what to do. A power management configuration utility would be sweet.

5. What other apps need to be installed for things to work right such as the volume buttons etc? I've emerged the thinkpad buttons program but nothing has changed. How do I get the SD card drive to work? I emerged pcmcia-cs but I haven't tested it. My usb dvd burner isn't working either. My onboard soundcard doesn't work also.

6. What apps are great for a basic desktop environment? I installed firefox and xmms. I will probably install open office. I want to have the open source equivalent of a windows based machine running the thinkpad utilities, MS Office, itunes, photoshop, Power DVD, and Nero CD/DVD burning. I'm sure that this would be what a lot of power users may look for. What do you recommend?

Sorry for all the questions, but I want to write the best damn Gentoo Thinkpad X40 guide ever. If we include the responses to Question 6, it could be used for far more than that. I've searched for these answers and I haven't found them, so please forgive me for being such a rookie. If you've seen a great guide for the info I'm looking for, please give me links.

I'll set the guide up on a webpage as a work in progress as soon as I get some assistance.

I'm looking at getting a thinkpad, i've been looking into it for months - I'm worried about the radeon 7500 in 99% of the thinkpads though, because i've heard it's poo and i'd like to be able to play the odd game of enemy territory!

Thanks!
I got mine refurbished from eritech.com for less than a grand. Seems perfectly new though.
I checked the websites you posted and it helped a lot (esp the first one, as I've scoured the second many times). Thanks! But if anyone else has any more info, I'd appreciate it!
-Saniko

I'm trying to setup Gentoo on my Thinkpad X40 (1.2 Pentium M, 768Mb RAM, 40 Gb Hard Drive, Intel 2100 wireless, 8 cell battery). I'm really new to linux, but I worked for MS and hate them so I'm switching to Gentoo. I would like to create a Gentoo guide for the Thinkpad X40 but I need some major help making this work well! Considering that it is an awesome machine in Windows XP and that it is reportedly great in Gentoo, I wish I could find more information on what to do.

The end result of my effort will be a super-detailed guide for Gentoo on the Thinkpad X40. Help me out! Currently after dozens of hours of study and work, I have a simple system running Gnome.

1. How should I compile my kernel? It's evident that genkernel will not get me everything I want. I used "make menuconfig" and set my processor on Pentium M, added some of the crypto wireless options and hotplug firmware options to get the wireless card working, turned on all the ACPI options (except for the thinkpad extras as the acpi-thinkpad package won't emerge with them on) and turned off all APM options. It's working, but it's definately not working as well as it should. Anyone got a .config file to post up here? How do you patch kernels and install programs without using emerge?

You will want to emerge the latest gentoo-dev-sources and compile it yourself. I can post my .config later.

Quote:

2. Which Desktop Environment should I use? I'm currently using GNOME, but I'm noticing a lot of things are built for KDE. I've also heard a lot about XFCE. Which one do you prefer for a guide? What's the difference between a desktop environment and a window manager?

I use Fluxbox, which is a window manager. But I have both Gnome and KDE fully installed in case I need them. I use gnome-terminal and occasionally gedit (preffering vim or gvim when I don't need to copy+paste much)

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3. Is there a wireless app that allows me to check out the available access points, select one, and configure the WPA or WEP key when necessary? A GUI based tool that incorporates the functionality of iwconfig, iwlist? Is there a way to turn off the wireless card to conseve battery life?

That is an interesting question. Personally I just edit /etc/conf.d/wireless and depend on the /etc/init.d/net.* scripts.

Quote:

4. How do you get suspend, speedstep, and hibernate to work? I installed the IBM ACPI stuff with emerge, and I'm still not sure what to do. A power management configuration utility would be sweet.

I had suspend working with apm, but I am using acpi now because I want to try and get cpufreq to work.

Quote:

5. What other apps need to be installed for things to work right such as the volume buttons etc? I've emerged the thinkpad buttons program but nothing has changed. How do I get the SD card drive to work? I emerged pcmcia-cs but I haven't tested it. My usb dvd burner isn't working either. My onboard soundcard doesn't work also.

The volume buttons just work for me. I haven't gotten the page buttons next to the arrow keys to work yet.

Quote:

6. What apps are great for a basic desktop environment? I installed firefox and xmms. I will probably install open office. I want to have the open source equivalent of a windows based machine running the thinkpad utilities, MS Office, itunes, photoshop, Power DVD, and Nero CD/DVD burning. I'm sure that this would be what a lot of power users may look for. What do you recommend?

In order of the most often I use them: gnome-terminal, firefox, gaim, (g)vim, xmms, gpdf, gmplayer, openoffice, gimp, cdrecord

EDIT: added a few

Quote:

Sorry for all the questions, but I want to write the best damn Gentoo Thinkpad X40 guide ever. If we include the responses to Question 6, it could be used for far more than that. I've searched for these answers and I haven't found them, so please forgive me for being such a rookie. If you've seen a great guide for the info I'm looking for, please give me links.

I'll set the guide up on a webpage as a work in progress as soon as I get some assistance.

What is ipw2100? I'm pretty sure he has wireless-tools as he already mentioned iwconfig, iwlist, and what not.

Power Conservation
I have a HP Pavilion 5325 and linux eats up my battery in under an hour and a half when it is supposed to last a little under 3 hours. So if you find any power conservation methods/options please let me know!

Of course, the obvious methods would be to turn off any devices that you are not using, turning down the contrast and so forth. I don't know if Linux has a stand-by mode, but it would be great if it did. My wireless card can be turned off by a button an external button I can push on my notebook, so that makes it easy for me to turn it off. Do thinkpads have one?

GUI Application for Wireless Configuration
As for a GUI application for configuring the wireless cards and connecting to wireless networks, I haven't found one either. I was thinking of creating my own little application myself. It doesn't look all to hard. I'm sure that if you have a little programming background you could do it as well. Right now though, since I am extremely lazy and crushed with homework, I made a bash script to connect to my wireless network. It lists all networks in the area and I pick which one I want to connect by selecting the corresponding number. It then asks me if the network is encrypted via WEP, and if so, it asks me to enter my WEP key. From there, it just does all the proper bash commands and connects to the network. =D It's alright for now, eventually I'll get around to make it into a GUI.

If you are interested in trying to make one, there are two IDEs that are specific to GUI development for certain desktop environments.

- emerge kdevelop for KDE
- emerge anjuta for GNOME

shat, I gotta get ready for school. Well good luck on your guide, I wanted to give you my two cents on desktop environments, but I'll do that when I get to school.._________________[ Specs ] PC
[ Specs ] Notebook: HP Pavilion zv5325ca

Thanks guys! The guide is coming along and I will post it up soon.
Has anything come up for the SD card or the Active Protection system? Those seem to be the only things that universally do not work at this point.
I'm getting the IBM a/b/g minipci as that doesn't seem to have all the issues of the Intel, which is no longer working in linux.

GUI Application for Wireless Configuration
As for a GUI application for configuring the wireless cards and connecting to wireless networks, I haven't found one either. I was thinking of creating my own little application myself. It doesn't look all to hard. I'm sure that if you have a little programming background you could do it as well. Right now though, since I am extremely lazy and crushed with homework, I made a bash script to connect to my wireless network. It lists all networks in the area and I pick which one I want to connect by selecting the corresponding number. It then asks me if the network is encrypted via WEP, and if so, it asks me to enter my WEP key. From there, it just does all the proper bash commands and connects to the network. =D It's alright for now, eventually I'll get around to make it into a GUI.

I'd very be interested in seeing that script. Have you considered using dialog for the UI? It's used by the kernel's "make menuconfig", and there are xdialog, kdialog, and gtkdialog extentions if you want to get fancy. Dialog just makes it easy to have all the functionality equaly available form the console.

freeix, the make command wouldn't work with your .config file. Is it missing something other than the comments or am I doing something wrong?
I'm actually having more trouble with the IBM a/b/g adaptor than the Intel because Knoppix doesn't support the IBM adaptor right off the CD.

Not sure about your thinkpad persay, but on my HP the SD card reader is a USB mass storage device, so enable that in your kernel, as well as SCSI disk support (USB disks show up as SCSI) If its a 5 in 1 or something similar, also enable "Probe all LUNs" under SCSI support. It should show up as sd*, prob /dev/sda. Add that to your fstab and you should be good to go.

freeix, the make command wouldn't work with your .config file. Is it missing something other than the comments or am I doing something wrong?

I dunno.. what is the make error?

You could run YOUR config file through:

Code:

grep -v "^#" /path/to/yourconfig"

and diff the output of that with mine.
I don't claim mine is perfect though.. it has some extra stuff like lvm and raid enabled just for kicks so I can answer support questions about such things and also few things are compiled as a module because I find modules irritating. Well, the USB stuff are modules because I read you need to rmmod them to get acpi suspend to work...

saniko wrote:

I'm actually having more trouble with the IBM a/b/g adaptor than the Intel because Knoppix doesn't support the IBM adaptor right off the CD.

Well I used ethernet for the install and got the wireless working a couple months later after I bought an AP.

i own a X40 too. if someone needs help post it here or PM me, i got everything working (vga out, wireless, dualhead) - i didn't try infrared or the sd slot - i don't care about these features._________________Easily backup up your system? klick
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Couldn't make this wireless adapter work by any means on Thinkpad x40. Compiled ipw2200
as a linux module, installed firmware also, but no result, ifconfig still doesn't show wlan0.
I wonder what is the problem, because I can see in dmesg output that the card was detected,
maybe I just have to do something else?

Yeah, I bought it from a Frenchman. Now I'm almost giving up about the wireless card, or at least temporarily. I have two other (more important) issues:
1) I can't get normal screen resolution in tty;
2) The sound doesn't work.

I recommend trying one of Pappy's Kernel seeds. You can find them here: http://kernel-seeds.org.
You then just need to add the appropriate drivers - which these are you can find out this way:
"Take the results of lspci -n and paste them at the following site: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/"
Quoted from Pappy's Kernel seed site._________________Kali Ma
Now it's autumn of the aeons
Dance with your sword
Now it's time for the harvest